The mother speaks. The mother cries.
“My elder son went to the battlefield to defend the soil of Iran and was killed. But I could not bury his younger brother in Iran’s soil,” the mother says. He was the youngest child, beloved by all. He is survived by his mother, his father, and his sisters.
I want to hold a moment of silence here. Out of respect. In memory.
Re: not naming the corpses.
“Do not murmur the names of the dead because if you murmur the names of the dead you will ruin the poetry of death” (Borzutzky 2011).
“It feels different to mourn something without naming its name” (Nelson 2005).
“And let us pray for the nameless corpses … The corpses are everyone and they are alone and alive in the grass and the sand and the forests and in our nostalgia for graves and tombstones and flowers that mark the memory of those bodies that once had names. And let us pray for the nameless corpses but let us not name them, says a body on a page of mutilated trees…. And the bodies ask the readers to pray with them. And the bodies tell the readers that by simply turning the pages they will be uttering the prayers for the dead” (Borzutzky 2011).
Please keep turning the pages, reader. Please keep praying for the dead. With me, with them.
corpse (14)
unconfirmed reports
They go down the stairs that lead to the gallery. Some people are leaving. At the door there is a sign that reads, “Private Show. By Invitation Only.” They could be denied entry. They don’t have invitations. But the artist is at the door saying good-bye to some guests, and when she sees them, she tells the doorman to let them in. She knows her from years back. She is hoping the sculptor will show up for the opening. She knows he knows the artist. She is hoping she can ask him a few questions. The hall is crowded. Young men and women, perhaps a new generation of artists, perhaps non-artists simply enamored with artistic milieus, mingle with older artists. A woman looks for more catalogs. A handsome older man takes a cup of tea from the tray the server is passing around. “My Period,” the pamphlet reads.
On the walls, in ornate golden frames: A menstrual pad with a cockroach in the middle. A pad with several bloodstains here and there. A pad with the ash from a cigarette. A pad with a safety pin in the middle. A pad with a pen cap. A pad with embroidery all around. A pad with the picture of a woman in the middle. A pad pasted over old, yellowing newspapers. A pad surrounded by words. A pad soaked in blood.
She and a friend walk around the gallery, saying hi to people they know, discussing the pieces on the walls. She suddenly sees a face she is certain she knows, but she can’t remember where from. She pauses and stares, unconsciously but so intensely that the other woman feels the weight of her gaze. The woman smiles. She smiles back and steps through the gliding French doors to the gallery courtyard. She can’t remember her name.
Several people are sitting around a table on seats made of tree trunks, smoking and drinking tea. People look her up and down. On the corner of the table, a tray of dates and sweets. Two kids are running around the empty fenced-in swimming pool. She looks around to see if the sculptor is out in the courtyard, but he is not. Talking to others and trying to decide which gallery to head to after this, she can’t stop thinking about the familiar face of the woman inside. And then she remembers.
The film. An homage to the women of the land. Never released. Made with novice actors and actresses. Episodic. Each episode the story of a female character dealing with one problem or another. Personal problems. Social contexts. The cast of each episode knowing only about their own episode, not about the movie as a whole, not about the other women. In the final credits, the only name revealed is that of the director.
Woven together, the larger picture could be deemed too bleak, vile, untrue. Could cause them to run into trouble with the officials. So the women appearing in front of the camera remain unaware of the presence of the others, or pretend to be. An unknowing. A silence. For protection.
And that is what she, too, does, for now: she pretends. Even though she, the one who made their words appear on the screen in the language of the Other, has seen them all, knows them all, has watched the pieces come together to create this one mass, one story.
Each woman is part of a community. Each has been and is alone.
Each helps herself. Each helps the others. All support the greater project. In hushed voices. In obliterated identities. In search of a new identity through art. Losing the self to find the self through art. Losing the self to create a larger self.
A film about the daily lives and struggles of women might or might not be screened where it was inspired, where it was produced. Its permits depend on the who and the when, on the winds of politics. To find an audience, it might need to be sent to one international festival or another. But international festivals might have their own issues. Most often looking for certain narratives of backwardness and victimhood, they pay attention to sociopolitics instead of aesthetics, instead of not alongside. A neo-orientalism bolstering the existing narrative of the Other who needs to be pitied, or feared. Such is the case in literature too. Certain narratives, certain representations.
Only a pretention to inclusivity, to diversity, to equality.
Think about the burdens of the creator, the artist.
Do the motives behind the artwork/writing have their intended effects on the audience/reader?
Why do we imagine a narrative of political events to always have political motives?
It is naive to even imagine that a narrative from this time, this place, this event, this people, this regime, written by a woman who does not feel belonging within any one border, within any one language, within any one definition, would be read as anything but political, especially in this language of the Other, in this land of the Other.
How do the political implications of the work change as a result of changes in the linguistic, cultural, and political context surrounding it? As a result of the spatial and the temporal context surrounding it? Can political narratives change the political climate?
What is the meaning of “political”? What makes something political? Can anything be truly apolitical?
Are things political by nature, or is it narrating them, speaking them, writing them that makes them political?
Or is it reading them that makes them political?
She walks back inside the gallery, visits different rooms to see if the sculptor has made an appearance. The woman is sipping tea and staring into the gold frame that embraces a blood-soaked pad. The woman doesn’t know her, isn’t aware that she worked on the film. She knows the woman, no, she doesn’t know the woman, but she knows something about the woman: her character in the film, her part, her story. In one scene in her episode, she sits alone in a gallery, a single woman staring at a piece of art and praying that she is pregnant with the illicit child of her lover. She checks her cell phone from time to time, perhaps wondering whether or not to text the lover to give him the news, or perhaps waiting to hear back from the clinic before taking any further steps. She sits next to the actress and joins her in staring at the pad.
She pretends she’s just another stranger in the room, but then the actress, still staring straight ahead at the frame, begins speaking to her, or herself: Why do we need to bleed? Her friend comes inside to tell her they need to leave. The sculptor is not coming, she says. The actress looks at the two of them. She smiles at the actress and murmurs a good-bye as she gets up to leave. Still sitting, the actress nods graciously, then turns to continue staring at the pad.
At a café later that evening, four women sit at a table. They order herbal teas. One woman has brought some homemade halva.
I don’t know why, but today I had an urge to make halva. I’m not sure which dead it’s for. Have some and say a prayer for whomever you wish, or for all the dead you know and don’t know, or for our own future dead selves, she says half-jokingly. On the walls there are black-and-white pictures of neighborhoods around the ci
ty. She ignores the halva and stands to look at the images. They are new, she realizes, manipulated to look old. The two young men and a young woman sitting at the next table keep laughing and texting.
On the walls, branches and utility poles and gates and windows and cabs and squares and public art and traffic lights and brick walls and newsstands and fruits and birds and construction sites and motorbikes and meat hanging from hooks in front of a butcher shop and flower girls and policemen and trash cans and boulevards and cul-de-sacs and ATMS and cafés and store signs and a mother and child and students and, and, and, and, and. On the back wall, on the other side of the staircase they’ve just come up, is a map of the city, not framed, adhered to the wall with dozens of wads of chewed gum. The map looks blurred and is illegible. She gets as close as she can to the railing. The map is many maps of the city, the norths and souths and easts and wests overlaying one another, the dates in the upper right corner turning into a year in a future that may or may not arrive or in a past that has disappeared without any trace, the streets and alleys and highways converging into a labyrinth with no entrance or exit in time or space. There are several red pins dotting the map, but the lines and words and numbers are so interwoven that no one can really decode the locations they mark or their purpose. One of the women calls her over. She turns around and heads back to the table. She thinks she will ask the server about the map when they leave.
I want to take her hand and bring her back to the map. Tell her it’s O.K. that she doesn’t understand. That she just needs to look—closely, with patience.
I want to speak to her about cities spoken by women.
“The city of changes, constructed by memory and destroyed by oblivion, is a city of death” (Tulli 2004).
“We are heirs and haunted, unknowingly. We are the descendants of a body-city” (Cixous 2006).
“The theme of [city]-as-theatre: ‘how to enter?’, a theme with a double stage and a double plot, one reflecting, relieving or sublating translating the other: how to enter the desired city which can never be found, always never there veiled commanded by a fort da? And how to enter among the inhabitants of the city among whom one is without being one finds oneself but crossed out, barred with bars [barré de barreaux], struck through, thrown spat out.
“My theme: how to enter, how to arrive and manage [arriver] to enter, how to get out of the outside in which one is locked up within the inside?” (Cixous 2006).
The men and the woman at the next table are gone. She notices a sheet of glass covering their table. Pieces of paper with scribbled notes are tucked in the space between the glass and the tablecloth. She pauses to take a look. One of the women joins her and stares at the surface intently. She points to a large note right in the middle.
She left it there a few months ago, the last time she was here. A man wrote the note for her.
It reads, “She is leaving. Why she is leaving, she doesn’t even know herself. We tell her not to leave. She says O.K., but she still leaves. She leaves every time. She leaves only to return. She says this is the last time, definitely the last time; this time I am going to stay. But she leaves again and again. I ask her, What is out there? She says, Nothing.
I ask her, What is here? She says, Everything. She leaves once again.” The note next to it reads, “Could one stay by leaving, leave by staying?” The one next to that reads, “What is the meaning of the café when its doors close at night, when there are no people in it, when no breath pollutes its air, when no eyes perceive its images?” The one next to that reads, “I want to know you, but I have left and you have arrived.”
And underneath: “In order to read the map, you need a different language. To learn it …” and the rest is covered by another note, this one wordless and filled with coffee stains, invading the space all the way to the table’s edge. The woman puts a hand on her shoulder. Their teas have arrived.
They join the rest of the group. She searches in her purse and puts a blank piece of paper on the table. An invitation to pen something while they sit around smoking, talking, drinking, sharing the halva, murmuring prayers for the dead. They take turns writing.
“People who speak your language. Images that speak your city. Black and white are dominant. But our lives are in color. Every day a new color. The café should stay open so we can return.”
“Some people you can’t help but love. Like the old man who walks back home, a cane in one hand, sangak bread in another. Like the pharmacist who tells you the neighborhood women’s favorite brands of menstrual pads. Some places you can’t help but love. Like the cluttered old store around the corner, which sells everything and nothing. Like the underground theater with its winding stairs and small café. Like the gardens of a former palace turned museum.
Some places you can’t help but remember, can’t help but come back to. No matter what, you have to return. One day. Some day.” “Loving. Talking. Nostalgia. Womanhood. Tea. Stories. Getting to know a stranger. The café. This love. A cigarette.”
“I want more of this.”
“We hugged. You asked what was happening / and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program / but instead that we were going on a journey, / one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid” (Bolaño 2008).
corpse (15)
of the living
of the dead
Why do narratives of the dead cast a shadow over narratives of those who survived?
Why this obsession with stories of the dead?
Do we attend to these narratives of death because, frozen in a moment in time, they stop transforming and offer more manageable, straightforward stories than the constantly reconfiguring, ongoing stories of life?
Can narratives of death really be fixed when the very moment of death is perceived and remembered differently by different witnesses?
Does the finality of death imbue its narratives with meanings more symbolic than the narratives of life and of a people’s attempts for survivance?
How does death define the experience of life?
“The earliest cities were cities of the dead. Among nomadic peoples the only fixed place was the tomb and the necropolis antedates the city of the living” (Jasper 2004).
Can the living even have a narrative without narratives of the dead?
How to constantly travel between the living and the dead? How to orchestrate the eternal relations between the two?
Why this obsession with the dead of one’s time? With the history that unravels during one’s time?
Are the events of one’s present even considered history? When does the present become part of history?
Corpse (2)
Age: 22
Gender: Male
Occupation: University student
Date of Death: 10 Shahrivar 1390 / 1 September 2011
Place of Death: Tehran
Time of Death: Between 11:30 p.m. and 3:00 a.m.
Cause of Death: Suicide with pills
Date of Burial: 13 Shahrivar 1390 / 4 September 2011
Place of Burial: Behesht-e Javad al-Aemmeh, Mashhad
He and his two friends (a human-rights activist and a woman) are arrested at his house. Plainclothes agents. Forcing their way in. Taking them to Evin Prison.
The young woman is released a few days later. He, eight days later, on bail.
He is from Mashhad. Studies in Tehran. He is not a political activist. He is arrested because of his friendship with the activist. He is forced to provide false confessions against him.
According to some friends, he was a happy, funny guy before his arrest, with no previous signs of depression.
According to others, he had suffered severe depression for some time. He had thought of suicide and had spoken of it but never acted upon it.
Prison. Interrogation. Psychological torture. Threats. Humiliation.
Wardens. Cell mates.
Threats of being forced into false confessions.
After his release, his condition deteriorates. His f
amily takes him to a psychiatrist. Plans are made for his admission to a clinic.
He commits suicide twenty-four days after his release.
The family last talks to him on the phone around midnight on Thursday. They find his lifeless body around three in the morning on Friday when they arrive at his house.
Police arrive. They disrespect the body and the family. The father and brother have to move the body by themselves, from their fourth-floor apartment to the ambulance.
Some believe the suicide was a result of the pressures of prison. Others mention his love for a woman, older than him, their relationship, the impossibility of their being together.
He was the youngest child. His parents came to Tehran from their hometown, Mashhad, to help with his release. Instead of him, they take home his corpse.
In accordance with his will, his organs are donated.
The friend who is a human-rights activist leaves the country when ultimately released.
Why are some narratives retold until they become symbolic while others are never revisited?
What is the role of chance in stumbling over these narratives?
What qualities make one death more worthy of attention than another?
What if the cruelest deaths, the most violent, the most revealing of the techniques of the oppressor, are the ones that have yet to be disclosed?
What if they are yet to come?
She checks her phone to see if the sculptor has texted her. He told her he would let her know if he was able to find time this evening for a meeting. Nothing. It’s time to go home. The women decide they should put the paper with their notes next to the others.
They tuck it on the left side. A memory.
trans(re)lating house one Page 3